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General discussionTechy Questions from an older user(32 posts)(32 posts)
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Posted January 30, 2018
4GB in 2 hours is what, about half a mbps? that's pretty terrible.

edit: oh yeah forgot to convert bytes to bits. it's around 4 and a half. still pretty bad.
Post edited January 30, 2018 by johnnygoging
Posted January 30, 2018
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johnnygoging: 4GB in 2 hours is what, about half a mbps? that's pretty terrible.
Certainly nothing to write home about. Personally, I think 16 Mbit/s is the barebones minimum for a sorta kinda bearable user experience in a world of digital distribution and 4K video streaming.
Posted January 30, 2018
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Themken: I just love exFAT for my USB memory sticks. I cannot understand that FAT32 is still around seeing as how it hates sticks with more than 4GB.
Blame Microsoft for patenting the format and the US patent office for granting that patent.

It's not devices (pr partitions) with more than 4GB that FAT32 hates; it's individual files with 2^32 bytes (4GB) or more. (Why that number? It's because 32 bits is only enough to represent numbers smaller than 2^32, assuming an unsigned integer representation.)

Incidentally, many Windows GOG installers are multipart installers, and if you notice, the parts are all less than 4GB (with most being slightly less than 4GB; this is precisely so that the files can be placed on a FAT32 filesystem. For installers that don't do this (like Linux GOG installers, for example), you can get around the limitation by using utilities like "split" to split the files and "cat" to combine them; these programs are standard on UNIX systems (including Linux and probably (modern) Mac OS). If you are using Windows, you can get access to them in a few ways; there's GnuWin32 (you want the "coreutils" package), cygwin which gives you a UNIX-like environment, and WSL (remember that whole "Ubuntu for Windows" thing? That's what I'm talking about here).
Posted January 30, 2018
Hm, just as a warning:

If your hard disk is 500GB, is formatted as Fat32 and has been in use since the XP days i guess its pretty old by now. Personally i wouldn't trust important data to a drive that old, especially if there isn't at least a second one for backups. Its probably worth to consider investing in one or two new drives before downloading everything, better safe then sorry...
Posted January 30, 2018
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ignisferroque: Hm, just as a warning:

If your hard disk is 500GB, is formatted as Fat32 and has been in use since the XP days i guess its pretty old by now. Personally i wouldn't trust important data to a drive that old, especially if there isn't at least a second one for backups. Its probably worth to consider investing in one or two new drives before downloading everything, better safe then sorry...
+1
People forget that there is a limit to HD write operations, just because early SSDs had lower counts.
Posted January 30, 2018
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bonzer: To zlaywal, timppu, randalator, groot, hereforthebeer (do you know how hard it is to type your name without spaces?)
On speedtest.net...Ping 18ms, D/L 5.15Mbps, U/L 0.26Mpbs
Yeah like someone guessed, you have a 5 Mbps line then. I guess it is ok'ish, albeit in many places 10Mbps is considered as the basic level broadband connection nowadays (and heavy users have 100Mbps or even 1000Mbps (=1Gbps), and your connection might not be fast enough for HD Netflix).

i have a 10Mbps cable modem connection myself, and I am pretty happy with it, still. It is included in the basic housing costs of my apartment. I could upgrade it to 100Mbps for something like 15€/month, but I am too cheapskate to do that right now.

Your upload speed is quite low though, but then that shouldn't affect your download speeds from GOG or elsewhere. It would only matter if you needed to send some big files to elsewhere (e.g. upload a big video from your computer to Youtube).

EDIT: And yeah the answer to your original question, your GOG download speeds seem ok considering your internet connection.

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Themken: 18ms ping time is very, very good; many an online gamer is green of envy. It may be normal for fibre but over copper not.
Oh, is it? When I ran the speedtest yesterday on my basic 10Mbps cable modem, I got 12ms ping. I think I am getting similar also when using my 4G LTE phone for internet (connected to the PC with an USB cable). Note that the ping times I get on online games like Team Fortress 2 may be considerably higher (like 30-50ms), depending where exactly the server is. Speedtest.net uses some nearby test server for the tests where low ping times are expected.

I don't know what kind of wiring the cable modem has, I presume it is copper? This is not a new house, built in the 80s.
Post edited January 30, 2018 by timppu
Posted January 30, 2018
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Themken: 18ms ping time is very, very good; many an online gamer is green of envy. It may be normal for fibre but over copper not.
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timppu: Oh, is it? When I ran the speedtest yesterday on my basic 10Mbps cable modem, I got 12ms ping. I think I am getting similar also when using my 4G LTE phone for internet (connected to the PC with an USB cable). Note that the ping times I get on online games like Team Fortress 2 may be considerably higher (like 30-50ms), depending where exactly the server is. Speedtest.net uses some nearby test server for the tests where low ping times are expected.

I don't know what kind of wiring the cable modem has, I presume it is copper? This is not a new house, built in the 80s.
I compared to the ping values I used to get in game servers but you are probably right that they are almost always much higher/worse.

We both use the same 'wizard' connection, I presume, and they (W) use a globally rare type of connection which allows far higher speeds than ADSL over the landline phone. I was thinking of landlines when I wrote copper.

Out of curiosity I did that speed test too. Automatically chosen server was my ISP's own, which leads to unrealistic numbers. 51Mb/s down, 5Mb/s up, 8ms ping. I would be satisfied with half as much at half the price.
Posted January 30, 2018
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timppu: Oh, is it? When I ran the speedtest yesterday on my basic 10Mbps cable modem, I got 12ms ping. I think I am getting similar also when using my 4G LTE phone for internet (connected to the PC with an USB cable). Note that the ping times I get on online games like Team Fortress 2 may be considerably higher (like 30-50ms), depending where exactly the server is. Speedtest.net uses some nearby test server for the tests where low ping times are expected.

I don't know what kind of wiring the cable modem has, I presume it is copper? This is not a new house, built in the 80s.
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Themken: I compared to the ping values I used to get in game servers but you are probably right that they are almost always much higher/worse.

We both use the same 'wizard' connection, I presume, and they (W) use a globally rare type of connection which allows far higher speeds than ADSL over the landline phone. I was thinking of landlines when I wrote copper.

Out of curiosity I did that speed test too. Automatically chosen server was my ISP's own, which leads to unrealistic numbers. 51Mb/s down, 5Mb/s up, 8ms ping. I would be satisfied with half as much at half the price.
I have 24Mb down, tops, and was promised a huge increase in speed from comcast when they forced me to update the modem (to a modem router combo). I found a hidden option in the modem and now it's running as a regular modem again. In the end, i just now have a bigger box that takes 5 minutes to get running again instead of 30 seconds. No increased speeds, no features, nothing, and they didn't really get anything out of the deal, either, ever since i found bridgemode. They can't use the cisco back door written into the router side, since the router side isn't activated. XD
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak:
Faster speed? A newer router will likely be a faster router but the switching and modem parts advance slower so I am not surprised. Hope you have a good software firewall then.
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak:
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Themken: Faster speed? A newer router will likely be a faster router but the switching and modem parts advance slower so I am not surprised. Hope you have a good software firewall then.
Well, i've been using a second piece of equipment with DD-WRT on it, since the modem i had before couldn't function as a router. So when they sent me this thing, i just hooked the router up to it and slowly disabled all it's features until bridgemode appeared. And I can tell you from the internal speed, as well as going to my girlfriend's house (she has the same internet provider, but she's not doing what i'm doing), that the router isn't the bottleneck. They basically just promised faster speeds so we'd upgrade the hardware to something with a backdoor in it, presumably to make support easier and cheaper. Your average shmuck isn't going to notice the lack of change. The firmware of the modem is what adds to the startup time. I also had the luxury of checking the speeds and comparing them to my girlfriend's before we made the switch, so I already knew ahead of time that they just wanted to get me to upgrade. They even threatened that the old hardware would quit working, which i can't test since I wanted to keep my http and smtp server up, so upgrading required sending the old hardware back. I've been told by people in the know that the old modem would've continued working.
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak:
I think for most people, it is better the ISP keeps the gateway updated from their side as I know very few who ever login to their routers or possibly once to set it up. You seem to know about these things so then it is alright to handle it yourself. :-)
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak:
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Themken: I think for most people, it is better the ISP keeps the gateway updated from their side as I know very few who ever login to their routers or possibly once to set it up. You seem to know about these things so then it is alright to handle it yourself. :-)
My thinking too. I do occasionally log in to the router (e.g. in the few cases I wanted to forward some ports, due to e.g. p2p), but since there has been so much talks about non-updated routers being a security threat, I am just happy I don't have to try to hunt down for updated firmwares and flash them myself.

And if I can't find any updated firmwares, does it mean the router is secure, or just that the vendor has abandoned it? Since this is the ISP's router and they take care of the updates, I presume they will replace it with a newer model if this one doesn't get some critical updates anymore.

And yeah for now I prefer to keep NAT on, just for some extra security, and that I can have many more (mobile etc.) devices getting their internet from the router as in bridged mode I would only get something like five (public) IP addresses from the ISP. We quite often have many more devices connected to the internet at the same time, considering how even TVs and all kinds of IoT devices nowadays want their internet too.

I understood though from the ISP's instructions that if one wishes to upgrade the connection to 100Mbps (now 10Mbps), then it should be switched to bridged mode. Maybe it works also in NAT mode, but not getting a full speed then.
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak:
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Themken: I think for most people, it is better the ISP keeps the gateway updated from their side as I know very few who ever login to their routers or possibly once to set it up. You seem to know about these things so then it is alright to handle it yourself. :-)
Actually, the backdoor is remotely accessible. I've actually seen the same back door on european connections as well, just not directly, since it tends to be blocked at the ISP. For my girlfriend, though, i noticed that since we connect to the same place, I can connect to her back door. I don't have the keys to it, but it's theoretically possible to break in via another computer using the same ISP. I read something about storing all the previous passwords, so it's a matter of finding out what the default password is (for the device) and i'll probably get in.
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak: ... so it's a matter of finding out what the default password is (for the device) and i'll probably get in.
I thought this bs was removed years ago. The default passwords are public knowledge after all. Typical: user = admin pw = admin... Extremely weak security.
Posted January 30, 2018
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kohlrak: ... so it's a matter of finding out what the default password is (for the device) and i'll probably get in.
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Themken: I thought this bs was removed years ago. The default passwords are public knowledge after all. Typical: user = admin pw = admin... Extremely weak security.
Not for this back door. I tried that one.
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General discussionTechy Questions from an older user(32 posts)(32 posts)
(32 posts)